Lost in the annual flurry of cards, roses, chocolates, and anxiety of Valentine’s Day is another very special day — Susan B. Anthony Day, or February 15 — named in honor of the Women’s Suffragette leader. So much so that many women today either aren’t familiar with her name or do not understand why what she did in the 1800s is still important for them in 2026.
But Susan B. Anthony is so much more than a name in a history book for uninterested eyes to gloss over or a creepy-looking face carved on a silver dollar coin you rarely see in actual circulation.
She was a woman who devoted her life to fighting for and obtaining rights for women and enslaved persons. She never married or had any children of her own, instead choosing to devote her life to teaching, advocating, and giving speeches promoting the feminist cause.
Starting Out
Born in Adams, Massachusetts on February 15, 1820, to parents Daniel and Lucy Read Anthony, Susan Brownell Anthony started out life focusing on her education even at a young age. Her father Daniel was a cotton mill worker and both he and his wife were very active in politics — specifically abolitionism.
In 1845, the family moved to New York.
There, young Susan attended a local district school, until the family moved again, this time to Philadelphia, where the young girl next attended Deborah Moulson’s Female Seminary.
During the panic of 1837 the Anthony family was one of many to abruptly find themselves facing financial ruin. Forced to drop out of the seminary, Susan returned to New York with her family and took a teaching job there to help support herself and her parents.
The Panic of 1837 triggered the Great Depression, which lasted until the mid-1840s. Historians now credit the financial crash to a burst real estate bubble and the nation’s irresponsible banking practices as a whole.
A woman on fire
In New York, the Anthony family rubbed elbows with famed anti-slavery activist Frederick Douglas.
Through him, the impressionable young Susan had a front row seat to the frontlines — learning all about how peaceful protest and persuasive public speaking can change the world.
The Anthonys were also against alcohol and were proud supporters of the American Temperance Movement sweeping through the nation. One of the group’s core beliefs was that drinking alcohol leads to the destabilization of American families.
In a moment that shaped the future suffragette’s life’s course, Anthony attempted to speak at a temperance convention but was immediately shot down because she was a female.
Choosing not to allow the unpleasant moment to knock her down as it was intended, Anthony did, however, allow the moment to change her direction.
Silenced but briefly, Anthony went back to the drawing board and decided to focus not on alcohol, but instead on the real villain — men!
The way Anthony saw it women like her could be sneered at by men during political and religious meetings — their thoughts and opinions laughingly cast aside—because they lacked the most basic of human rights, chief among them, the right to vote.
These same men, according to Anthony, were also responsible for keeping women from the right to vote based solely on attributes assigned to them by their gender, again, by men.
Anthony realized as long as women have no right to vote their opinion will never matter because they lack the legal validation to make that opinion count. She wrote: “There never will be complete equality until women themselves help to make laws and elect lawmakers.”
Two Peas in a Suffragette Pod
In 1851, Anthony traveled to Seneca Falls, the hometown of author Elizabeth Cady Staton, her idol, to attend a speech the author was giving. Afterwards, Anthony and Stanton were introduced by a mutual friend, soon becoming inseparable.
Working well together in a career that spanned over sixty years,’ the duo sparked changes in voting rights, published a weekly newspaper [The Revolution], and left behind a legacy that has reverberated through the generations.
Together they founded the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869, of which Anthony was a President.
Long may she be remembered
Anthony passed away on March 13, 1906, at the age of 86 from heart failure and pneumonia. She was buried inside the Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, New York.
When she died, women still did not have the right to vote.
Without the action and bold words of individuals like Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Staton, and many other women and men, women today would still have no reason to be heard.
It may have taken twenty years, and come fourteen years after her death, but Anthony’s work proved to be a torch lighting the path for the passing of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution — granting the right to vote to women at long last. It is also referred to as the “Susan B. Anthony Amendment” in honor of her life’s work and sacrifice.
Additionally, a very special honor was bestowed posthumously on Anthony by the United States government on July 2, 1979, when she became the first female to have her image engraved on a coin circulating from the U.S. mint.
Speaking like a suffragette
Like all brilliant minds, Anthony left behind a few words of wisdom to share with the men and women of every age:
- · “I declare to you that woman must not depend upon the protection of man, but must be taught to protect herself, and there I take my stand.”
- · “I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.”
- · “Independence is happiness.”
- · “Organize, agitate, educate, must be our war cry.”
- · “No man is good enough to govern any woman without her consent.”